HANOI, Vietnam (AP) - A former senior aviation official apparently
attempted suicide after being suspended from his position for
financial mismanagement, officials and state-controlled media
reported Monday.

Nguyen Lai, former general director of the Airport Authority for
Central Vietnam, was taken to a hospital in central Danang city on
Saturday with serious burns on his face, neck and limbs, said Pham
Van Thanh, the deputy head of the agency.

Thanh said Lai had attended a meeting earlier in the day and came
back to his office.

A staff member heard strange noises coming from his locked room and
forced the door open, Thanh said. The room was filled with gas fumes.

Lai, who was only wearing an undershirt and shorts, was rushed to a
hospital in Danang and transferred to a hospital near Hanoi on Sunday
where his condition is improving, Thanh said.

"Several days before, he complained that he was tired and appeared to
be tense,'' he said.

Local media are reporting that it was an attempted suicide though
Thanh said police are still investigating the incident.

Lai was suspended from his position earlier this month for using
nearly 24 billion dong (US$1.5 million; euro1.15 million) in
government funds to buy land for his personal use, officials have
said.

He also failed to get approval from the ministry to buy a Mercedes
and a BMW in 2003.

Dozens of officials and executives from the aviation, oil and gas and
textile industries have been arrested in recent months for their
involvement in corruption scandals. - AP

Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the quick-tempered South Vietnamese national police
commander whose impromptu execution of a Viet Cong prisoner on a
Saigon street in the Tet offensive of 1968 helped galvanize American
public opinion against the war, died on Tuesday at his home in Burke,
Va. He was 67 and had operated a pizza parlor in nearby Dale City.

A son, Larry Nguyen, said the cause was cancer.

In a long war that claimed two million lives, the death of a single
Viet Cong official would hardly have seemed noteworthy, especially in
a week when thousands of insurgents were killed mounting an offensive
that included the beheading of women and children in Saigon.

But when Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan raised his pistol on Feb. 1,
1968, extended his arm and fired a bullet through the head of the
prisoner, who stood with his hands tied behind his back, the general
did so in full view of an NBC cameraman and an Associated Press
photographer.

And when the film was shown on television and the picture appeared on
the front pages of newspapers around the world, the images created an
immediate revulsion at a seemingly gratuitous act of savagery that
was widely seen as emblematic of a seemingly gratuitous war.

The photograph, by Eddie Adams, was especially vivid, a frozen moment
that put a wincing face of horror on the war. Taken almost at once
with the squeeze of the trigger, the photo showed the prisoner,
unidentified and wearing black shorts and a plaid shirt, in a final
grimace as the bullet passed through his brain. Close examination of
the photo, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, showed the slug
leaving his head.

For all the emotional impact, the episode had little immediate
influence on on the tide of American involvement in the war, which
continued seven years longer, until the evacuation of Saigon in 1975.
Indeed, it was four years after the execution that another indelible
image of the war created a new round of revulsion, the sight of a
screaming 9-year-old as she ran naked along a road after having been
burned in a South Vietnamese napalm attack.

The execution changed General Loan's life.

One of the 11 children of a prosperous mechanical engineer, Mr. Loan
was born in Hue. He graduated near the top of his class at the
University of Hue and begun a career as a jet pilot in the South
Vietnamese Air Force. As a close friend of Nguyen Cao Ky, the
swashbuckling pilot who became Premier in 1965, Mr. Loan, then a
colonel, was put in charge of the national police and gained an
immediate reputation among Western reporters for his temper and rages
at the scenes of Viet Cong attacks on civilian targets.

Some of those who knew him said General Loan would not have carried
out the prisoner execution if reporters and photographers had not
been at the scene.

Mr. Loan insisted that his action was justified because the prisoner
had been the captain of a terrorist squad that had killed the family
of one of his deputy commanders.

Even so the killing and other summary executions by the South's
military in the Tet offensive drew immediate rebukes from American
officials. A few days after the incident, Mr. Ky, who had become Vice
President, said the prisoner had not been in the Viet Cong military
but was "a very high ranking" political official.

Mr. Loan later suggested that the execution had not been the rash act
it might have appeared to be but had been carried out because a
deputy commander he had ordered to shoot had hesitated. "I
think, 'Then I must do it,' " he recounted. "If you hesitate, if you
didn't do your duty, the men won't follow you."

Vo Suu, a cameraman at the scene for NBC News, recalled that
immediately after the shooting the general had walked over to a
reporter and said, "These guys kill a lot of our people, and I think
Buddha will forgive me."

When General Loan was severely wounded while charging a Viet Cong
hideout three months later and taken to Australia for treatment,
there was such an outcry there against him that he was moved to the
Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where he was
repeatedly denounced in Congress.

Back in Saigon, Mr. Loan, who had been relieved of his command after
having been wounded, seemed a changed man, devoting time to showering
presents on orphans. At the fall of Saigon his pleas for American
help in fleeing were ignored. But he and his family escaped in a
South Vietnamese plane.

After his presence in the United States became known there was a move
to deport him as a war criminal. But the efforts fizzled, and Mr.
Loan, whose right leg had been amputated, settled in northern
Virginia, where he eventually opened his pizzeria, which he operated
until 1991 when publicity about his past led to a sharp decline in
business. As a message scrawled on a restroom wall put it, "We know
who you are."

In addition to his son, who also lives in Burke, Mr. Loan is survived
by his wife, Chinh Mai; a daughter, Nguyen Anh of Fairfield, Va.;
three other children, a brothers and sisters and nine grandchildren.

Copyright: The New York Times

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